About ‘She Said, She Said’

PUT AN APPLE on the table and one sister sees a quick lunch, while the other sees an ingredient for sauce.  It’s the same with a memory: Toss one out and while one sister sees it as no big deal, the other will really want to make something of it. After all, no two sisters will have the same response to, say, recollections of past Thanksgivings, family vacations or their mother’s rapier wit.

Where does this leave the truth, that proverbial apple of all our eyes? Slippery as ever, elusive to a fault, the truth really is just one version of a tale. In “She Said, She Said,” the play on that truth is the thing.

This is the blog of me, Marion Roach Smith, with my sister, Margaret Roach, 22 months my senior. Though the baby sister, I will take the lead, writing of our lives as sisters; Margaret will kibbitz, chime in, object, deflect, or maybe even occasionally agree, though we strongly doubt this last one since we’ve pretty much never agreed on anything–except those things that matter greatly, like loyalty and politics. That stuff we’ve got down just fine. It’s the small stuff that is invariably a very big deal.

Sound familiar? Or is this the first time it has occurred to you that you, much like every other sister on earth, are part of a twinned story, not the whole tale, but a facet, an integral piece, a slice of the pie? This might be why siblings can be both so grounding and infuriating at the same time: By their very existence they constantly remind us that out there lurks another version of our most hilarious, come-to-Jesus, or profound moments, to which a sister might just simply say, “That never happened,” or “That’s not how it went,” or, “What family did you grow up in?”

Separate responses to the same experiences. It’s a sister thing.

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T HE SISTER PROJECT began because we two began writing a book together, a shared memoir on the subject of nature or nurture—the alternate realities of siblings. We have both been writing a long time, as our parents did before us.

Marion Roach Smith is the author of The Roots of Desire: The Myth, Meaning and Sexual Power of Red Hair; the co-author of Dead Reckoning, a story of forensic science, and author of Another Name for Madness, the story of our mother’s early onset Alzheimer’s Disease.  She has written widely in magazines, newspapers and has also contributed essays to NPR’s All Things Considered and to Sirius Satellite Radio, where her daily Naturalist’s Datebook has aired for three years. A frequent guest lecturer on the topic of writing nonfiction, Marion has since 1998 taught a class on memoir entitled “Writing What You Know.” To date she has had more than 500 students.

Margaret Roach, until 2008 the Editorial Director of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, oversaw all the company’s books, magazines and specials, including Martha Stewart Living, Everyday Food, Martha Stewart Weddings, and Body + Soul, and ran the division that started marthastewart.com.  She began her journalism career at The New York Times, went to Newsday, and  in 1994, her green thumb led her to Martha Stewart Living, where she became the magazine’s first garden editor.  Margaret’s book A Way to Garden, was named Best Garden Book of 1998 by the Garden Writers of America. The book is now incarnated online in the form of awaytogarden.com, the first project debuted by her new company, Margaret Roach Inc., the company behind The Sister Project.

Publishing successes by students in Marion Roach Smith’s Memoir Project, a popular class conducted for a decade in the capital region of New York State, was the subject of a recent piece in the Albany Times Union. Read more about what some students have accomplished in the workshop, which has a one-year waiting list for a spot. Or just start writing along with Marion as your coach now, right here on TSP. She makes it pretty easy to get typing…and no waiting required.